Interesting Links for 16-08-2017

[andrewducker]

Advice to the Only Actor Who's Realized They're in a Shitty Film  (tags: movies bad advice ) Why Nazi symbols should not be covered by Freedom of Speech (tags: freespeech nazis ) Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong (tags: mathematics research ) Who runs a social media campaign without checking how it can be abused?????

Comments

Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong

[cartesiandaemon]

It's weird how accurate that is. Of course, thinking about it, when *I* evaluate maths news, my heuristic is something like:

* If it's published in a reputable maths journal, or published to arxiv with a provisional acceptance to a journal, or by a reputable mathematician, the actual maths is usually correct.
* If a news article states the importance of a result they are usually wrong; the exceptions are quotes from reputable mathematicians, or long explanations of how important the problem is.
* If it's genuinely groundbreaking, I won't hear about it from a press release, but from somewhere like Scott's blog :)

[cartesiandaemon]

"Researchers found the more intelligent people were more likely to guess the second part of a psychological study was secretly related to the first half and nothing to do with what it was ostensibly about."

I hope that's not the case but I always worry about it when I hear about experiments :)

[mlknchz]

Of course, I also believe the hammer and sickle is not covered by freedom of speech